Zero Tolerance (1994)

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

This is a cheap take off of Die Hard, but it's memorable once you get past the build up romantic part which is a rip off of Robocop, where the cop is having flashbacks to his wife and kids. I watched it with my wife and she was thoroughly entertained so the romantic parts were good in terms of making it more of a date flick for guys to watch. I was watching it for massive carnage and was instantly amused that Patrick's rifle bullets were all explosive grenade types. Which, outside of a shotgun sized shell, I don't know of explosive bullets in the normal rifle size. This trick was done in Robocop with the bad guys in the end getting the "latest military hardware" in the future so it was easy to suspend belief with that but this is set in 1994 not 2044, so if you are looking for realism skip this one. I knew it would be a cheesy film so was OK with it. Oh, and all the bad guys when they use rifles their bullets don't explode either. Keep an eye on Patrick around the third boss attack, a henchman will be using a rifle and the bullets will be normal, after getting whacked, Patrick picks up the dead henchman's rifle and magically the rifle turned into a grenade launcher as the bullets were exploding! I therefore rationalized that Patrick had magical powers and fired magic bullets! Fun film, loved the carnage, and cheesiness! 7 of 10. BTW, Patrick's magical powers only work on rifles not pistols, lol enjoy.

Zero Tolerance stars Robert Patrick as an FBI man with wife played by real life wife Barbara Patrick and two children. He gets an assignment to bring back from Mexico a notorious drug lord in Titus Welliver.Things start to pop and don't let up for a minute when Welliver escapes custody with Patrick's two other agents and a whole lot of Welliver's men escape. Welliver then gets the brilliant idea to take Patrick's family hostage and then confront Patrick and force him to take him across the border under the guise of custody, Welliver and a whole lot of illegal heroin. Works too and then he kills Patrick's family and nearly blows Patrick up in a limousine.After that it's personal as Patrick whom we see a hint of his violent nature during Welliver's escape, goes full blown Rambo. The body count may run into triple digits. Did Sly Stallone ever do that well? Patrick is after the rest of Welliver's associates a five member board of a drug gang known as the White Hand. Do we have to ask if he succeeds?If you like chase scenes, lots of bloody violence, and plenty of action you'll love Zero Tolerance. Makes one overlook a whole lot of flaws in the writing and the direction.

PM knows action, and by this point in their history they had refined their craft to such a point that they turned it into an art. Case in point: Zero Tolerance. This movie is awesome. It delivers the goods in every possible way.Jeff Douglas (Patrick) is a by-the-book FBI agent and family man. On what he thinks will be just a routine assignment, he must go down to Mexico and pick up Manta (Welliver), an evil, but charismatic killer and drug dealer. He is a member of the White Hand, a sinister underworld organization intent on putting a new form of liquid heroin on the streets. Things don't go exactly as planned, and Manta escapes. Now back with his criminal associates Vitch (Fleetwood), Kowalski (O'Keeffe), LaFleur (Anderson-Gunter), and others, he commits an act that is so horrendous against Jeff Douglas, Jeff must go rogue and systematically kill all the baddies. His FBI counterparts don't approve of his reckless ways, but Jeff doesn't care. He's traveling around the country on a no-holds-barred revenge mission, and for the people that wronged him, he has ZERO TOLERANCE.Robert Patrick as the hero, Jeff Douglas, was an excellent choice. Zero Tolerance has way more emotion than a normal film of this type, and Patrick is just the man to carry it off. That's something that makes this movie special. You can see Douglas slowly losing patience with life, and being stripped of everything he has. With his emotions flooding, we see he has nothing left to lose, and he takes out his grief and pain, as well as anger, on his aggressors. Another interesting casting choice was Mick Fleetwood as one of the top bad guys. It seems the filmmakers wanted to go with Donald Pleasance, but seeing as how the drummer for Fleetwood Mac is evil in real life, the casting decision was a no-brainer. O'Keeffe puts in one of his best roles also, as the conflicted baddie with the Matt Hannon-like hair.Titus Welliver is also noteworthy as the sinister, purple suited Manta. He's actually not the only one in the movie that wears a purple suit. He even has a multi-screen videoconferencing system with his fellow evildoers which can only be described as GoToDrugDeal (patent pending). This was way before Skype and a lot of other technology. As we discussed in the Bloodmoon (1997) review, direct to video action movies oftentimes are ahead of the curve technology-wise, but no one gives them credit because no one ever talks about them.But the bottom line is, this is a mega-entertaining, fast-paced gem that delivers the goods times ten. It's the best kind of revenge movie. It has a well-written plot, a likable hero, a hate-able villain, and action and stunts galore, but it actually has underpinnings of emotion and depth. What more could you want? Zero Tolerance gets our most enthusiastic recommendation. See it today! For more insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com

It annoys the hell out of me when, if a film has a lot of violence and/or gore, that automatically means it's second rate, with poor acting and a weak script etc. I would say 'Wishmaster' is an example. Lots of gore = poor, so to speak. And I would say this is another of those types of films. It has an excessive amount of violence, which means by most people, including major film reviewers, it's discarded as junk.And that's a pity because this film is really rather good. I'll be the first to admit that I'm drawn to any film which has warnings about its levels of violence, but this, along with 'To Protect and Serve', seemed to shine above the rest.Anyone who said this film has poor acting obviously missed the bit when Jeff, over the phone, learns his family has been massacred. After a brief period of time, Jeff goes over the edge, and Robert Patrick does it perfectly.This has been done before, and is, in some instances, ridiculous. (At one point, Jeff drives his car through the side of a helicopter. The helicopter goes boom, but the car emerges almost undamaged.) But then again, Die Hard was pretty ridiculous too, and that was one of the greatest action films I've ever seen. This isn't Oscar winning stuff, but it's damn good.Caution is advised: Some scenes are very violent.8/10 - I thoroughly enjoyed it